Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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There was another interesting article on coronavirus models. Models are an imperfect tool. They are based on many assumptions, best guesses. They rely on the data that fed into them to be accurate. But there is a trend in society that once the government latches onto a model that it attacks any competing models. There is a level of scientific intolerance.

One of the paradoxes of the coronavirus crisis is that the need for public scrutiny of government policy has never been greater, but there’s less tolerance for dissent than usual.

I’m thinking in particular of the work of Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, which has done so much to inform the government’s decision-making. Remember, it was Professor Ferguson’s prediction last month that an extra 250,000 would die if the government didn’t impose extreme social distancing measures that led to the lockdown last week [in Great Britain].

Anyone questioning Professor Ferguson’s analysis is likely to be met with a tsunami of opposition. Witness the furious reaction provoked by Professor Sunetra Gupta and her team at Oxford University when they published a paper suggesting half the UK’s population could already have been infected. The Financial Times printed a critical letter co-signed by a group of scientists that was reminiscent of left-wing academics denouncing one of their colleagues for dissenting from woke orthodoxy. They used the word ‘dangerous’ in their description of the Oxford research, as if merely challenging Imperial’s model would cost lives, and Professor Ferguson has made the same argument to condemn other critics of his work. ‘It is ludicrous, frankly, to suggest that the severity of this virus is comparable to seasonal flu — ludicrous and dangerous,’ he said.

But it’s only ‘dangerous’ to question his research if you take for granted that it is correct. What if the claim that 40 million people would have died if the world had carried on as normal is wrong? The Oxford modelling was criticised on the grounds that many of the assumptions made by Professor Gupta were ‘speculative’ and had no ‘empirical justification’, but the same is true of the Imperial model. The FT’s Jemima Kelly said Oxford’s research should be taken with a large dose of salt because it was ‘not yet peer reviewed’, but Imperial’s paper hasn’t been peer reviewed either. As John Ioannidis, professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, has pointed out, some of the major assumptions and estimates that are built into the Imperial model — such as the case fatality rate — ‘seem to be substantially inflated’.

A more prudent approach would be for the government not to place too much confidence in any one model, but to encourage different teams of experts to come up with predictions of their own and challenge their rivals. That’s the tried-and-tested scientific method and it has been bizarre to see respected pundits and senior politicians simultaneously argue that we should be strictly guided by ‘the science’ and that any scientist expressing dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy is behaving ‘irresponsibly’. Wasn’t that precisely the same argument used by the Chinese authorities for silencing the doctors who first raised the alarm in Wuhan? Shutting down dissent during an actual war might make sense, but in a war against a virus it is vital that we should stick to the scientific method. As Sir Karl Popper said: ‘The point is that whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it.’

Source: Dissent Over Coronavirus Research Isn’t Dangerous – But Stifling Debate Is

Matt Stoller I think has a good piece here:

My family sending doomsday style messages considering the financial impact. Doomsday had to happen sometime. Might as well be in our lifetime.

Exponential growth in NY suburbs

I feel 9 million unemployed is a cause for alarm.

Once this is over, most people will get their jobs back—but how many, actually?

That probably largely depends on how many businesses are unable to recover.

There were banks during the depression that collapsed that led to large banks in the US swallowing them up. One of them which comprises of over 200 collapsed banks. In that time the data has a margin of unemployment of anywhere between 20-30%. Where will this be after the multiple ripple effects?